I’ve been on a huge space opera kick for the last year or so and have been reading every example of the New Space Opera I can get my hands on. Space opera, for those who don’t know, is the sort of larger-than-life science fiction typified by Star Wars and Star Trek. Unlike Hard Science Fiction, which attempts to limit itself to what’s possible, or at least close to what’s possible, Space Opera is happy to slush around in all kinds of impossibilities.
Faster-than-light travel, wormholes, time travel, myriad alien civilizations — space opera does it all. The New Space Opera is a movement that’s grown in popularity over the last few years, and fuses some aspects of Hard SF onto a space operatic frame. Alastair Reynolds is one of the leading writers of the New Space Opera and his Revelation Space trilogy typifies the movement.
Absolution Gap is the third book in this series. In earlier novels, humanity has expanded to the stars via “lighthuggers”, starships that travel just below the speed of light. They’ve found the ruins of a dozen alien civilization, but time and again the aliens are long dead by the time we arrive. Over the course of the first two books, we discover exactly why all these alien civilizations died … and why we might be next. Absolution Gap promises to answer the question of whether we can avoid our own extinction, though it’s certainly taking its time doing it.
Reynolds is quick enough to bring characters from Book 2, but he also introduces a new subplot on a world entirely divorced in time and space from the main storyline. This tends to slow down the pace of the book as you pop back and forth from the characters you care about to new ones that aren’t nearly as compelling. I expect there will be a pay off for this divergence — Reynolds is always good about delivering on that — but I wish he’d sped things up.